Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley are the co-writers (and in Greg's case, director) of Sing Sing – a prison drama that tips on its head the entire prison drama genre. This is a film that forefronts humanity and tenderness instead of the violent and savagery that often powers movies set in jail. There are prison dramas we all adore but how many times have we seen a vision of prison that depicts those places as violent pits where society’s most dangerous animals stew in their savagery?

In Sing Sing – about a group of convicts who stage a play at the Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison near New York – our characters, many of whom are played by real-life graduates of the Rehabilitation Through The Arts programme seen in the movie, are depicted with a rare sensitivity. Whatever their pasts, as this group of would-be thespians build towards the staging of a comedy titled Breakin' The Mummy's Code they’re human to viewers in a way cinema rarely affords. It’s besides the point to say that the film is already being tipped for Oscar glory – this film and the performances of Colman Domingo and newcomer Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin in particular, is a phenomenal achievement in itself without awards validation. Don't miss this in-depth conversation about how it came together on the page.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.

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"His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them." So wrote Patricia Highsmith in her seminal literary thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955. You might also characterise the work of our guest today, the talented Mr. Steven Zaillian, this way. The worlds and characters of his films and TV shows are imagined in such rich detail and complexity that you can absolutely imagine him believing them to be real as he crafts them on the page. In fact, that level of detail and depth has been his calling card for over thirty decades in Hollywood now. From 1990’s Awakenings and 1993’s Schindler’s List, which won Steven an Oscar, all the way to films like Gangs of New York, American Gangster, Moneyball, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Irishman, there’s a thrillingly convincing quality about whatever story he’s telling – oftentimes, his characters are people you can imagine pulling up a barstool next to you and telling you a tale you’ll never forget.

This month, he’s up for an Emmy for his work with Ripley – a Netflix adaptation of Highsmith’s novel, that Steven acted as showrunner for, writing and directing every episode. The series is a hypnotising ten hours in the company of a conman, Tom Ripley, who’s hired by a wealthy businessman to convince his son to return home from a life of leisure abroad on the Italian coast. But the more Tom – played here by Andrew Scott – ensconces himself in the lives of Dickie Greenleaf, played by Johnny Flynn, and Dakota Fanning as his partner, Marge Sherwood, the more his lies and his lust for what Dickie has mutates into something murderous.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Steven tells us about the relevance of fraudster stories in a time of Trump and other public deceivers. We get into the writing tricks and tips that make you root for the morally thorny characters he often writes. And the rationale behind every change from both the novel and the Matt Damon-starring 1999 adaptation of Ripley is uncovered too, as we delve into the slightly different ending to this version of the tale and the meaning of Italian artist Caravaggio’s presence throughout this story. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.

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“You’re remembered for the rules you break.” So says Ben Affleck in Air, the 2023 sports marketing drama that took its own advice. Written by our guest today, Alex Convery, Air shouldn’t have been the captivating cinematic slam-dunk it turned out to be. At least, not on paper. A drama about the creation of the Nike Air Jordan trainer? That sounds like a film that’s gonna play out largely in grey, air conditioned boardrooms. It sounds like a film that’s gonna have limited suspense, because we all know that Air Jordan became this huge sports brand. It also sounds perhaps like it could be a nakedly capitalistic celebration of a product – Hollywood scraping the barrel in a time of endless IP and emphasis on “brand recognition."

But Air turned out to be a film about Nike. At least, not entirely. It’s a drama about our connection to “things” and the intelligent people that foster those connections – who recognise how, for better or worse, in a capitalist world, products like an Air Jordan trainer can become these symbols of the lives we want to lead and the people we aspire to be. Directed by Affleck from Alex’s spec script, it starred Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro and Viola Davis as Deloris Jordan, mother to Michael Jordan – the greatest basketball player of all time. Alex had the idea for the movie after watching Netflix documentary series The Last Dance and – well, we'll leave the rest for him to explain.

It was a total pleasure chatting with Alex about what Air says about 1980s America, and about stories that use an un-obvious perspective to frame their subject – Jordan through the eyes of a marketing exec, like Jesus through the eyes of the devil in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. We also get into how Air fits into a new Hollywood trend of movies based on products: Barbie, Blackberry, Tetris and so on. Alex had great insights on it all.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.

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This week we’re joined by the excellent James Vanderbilt, screenwriter of the 2007 David Fincher thriller, Zodiac. James has had an impressively eclectic Hollywood career: on top of writing action adventures like White House Down, detective comedies like Murder Mystery, sci-fi sequels like Independence Day 2 and the odd Spider-Man blockbuster or two, he’s also produced horror hits (Slender Man, Ready Or Not) and stepped behind the camera to direct his own gripping historical drama (2015’s Truth). Before all that, though, came this cult smash: a slow-burn dramatisation of the hunt for the most notorious serial killer in American history.
Zodiac was a labour of love. Vanderbilt obsessed over the mysterious murderer’s identity for decades before writing the film, based on the 1986 non-fiction book of the same name by Robert Graysmith. Graysmith was a cartoonist working at the San Francisco Chronicle when a string of gruesome killings across the Bay Area, by one unknown assailant, left the region in a state of panic and paranoia. The killer, known as the Zodiac, wrote cryptic letters to Graysmith’s paper that perplexed police, and sent Graysmith on a personal mission to uncover the killer’s identity. The Zodiac was never caught. Vanderbilt’s film tells the story of Graysmith’s ultimately unsuccessful search for the truth.
If you’re wondering how you write a satisfying thriller in which the killer gets away, don’t worry: James did too. I chatted to James from his home in LA to hear about the conventions he had to break to make this incredible movie, the dizzying amount of research that he and Fincher undertook to make sure they were telling the victims’ stories responsibly, and whether or not he’d ever consider making of sequel of sorts, about the notorious 1970s killer the Son of Sam.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Kirsten ‘Kiwi’ Smith and Karen McCullah are the writers behind the timeless high school comedy 10 Things I Hate About You. Released in 1999, their Gil Junger-directed teen reworking of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew had it all: big laughs, blossoming romance, coming-of-age emotion and a ridiculously fun soundtrack. The film told the tale of two sisters: a smart but abrasive outcast called Kat (Julia Stiles) and her younger sibling Bianca (Larisa Oleynik), who’s banned from dating until her sister does. When new kid Cam (Joseph Gordon Levitt) falls for Bianca, a plan is hatched to set Kat up with mysterious bad boy Patrick, played by the late, great Heath Ledger.
Karen and Kiwi told us all about the rebellious fun of turning a classic literary tale into a high school romp, the ahead-of-its-time feminist message they wanted the film to have, and the erotic fiction-loving character they cut out of the movie to cast the story in a whole new light. There’s also revelations about a secret, swear-word-related CGI shot you’ve probably noticed before, and what they’d do differently if they were writing the film today.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. 

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In this very special Halloween episode of Script Apart, we step inside the ghoulish, gothic holiday musical that’s enchanted millions worldwide since its release in 1993. We’re talking of course about The Nightmare Before Christmas – the timeless, twisted story of a pumpkin king named Jack Skellington and his ragdoll friend Sally. Our guest this week, Caroline Thompson, wrote the film’s screenplay, based on a poem by producer Tim Burton, with songs by composer Danny Elfman.
Caroline, who also wrote Edwards Scissorhands, came onboard the project at an eventful time. Things hadn’t worked out with another screenwriter. With production already underway, it was up to Caroline to turn a loose story into a living, breathing script, with a convincing love interest for Jack Skellington. The pressures facing Burton, Caroline and director Henry Selick led to a frenzied creative environment where, as you’ll discover in this episode, tempers often flared. It was worth it, though. Animated movies don’t come much more beloved than the deliriously imaginative Nightmare Before Christmas.
Here’s Caroline on her chaotic experience making the movie, why she’ll always a place in her heart for Frankensteinian sweetheart Sally, why she fought but failed to change the villainous Oogie Boogie, and the likelihood of a Nightmare Before Christmas sequel ever seeing the light of day.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from virtual co-working hosts Caveday – sign up for a free three-hour Cave using the promo code "SCRIPTAPART" at checkout.

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Derek Kolstad is the writer responsible for one of the biggest action franchises in cinema today. 2014’s John Wick was a gripping neo-noir revenge flick that saw Keanu Reeves play a retired assassin grieving the loss of his wife. When a chance encounter with a Russian gangster leads to the death of his beloved dog, the character embarks on a violent crusade for vengeance, drawn back into a murky criminal underworld he thought he’d left behind. The film was a frenzy of breathtaking fight sequences and emotional character beats, directed by Keanu’s former Matrix stunt-person Chad Stahelski. Two equally acclaimed sequels soon followed, with further sequels and spin-offs currently in development.
Derek wrote the movie after finding himself wondering one day what he would be capable of if someone ever hurt one of his two dogs. His original vision for the movie, however, was a little different to the film we know today. As you’ll discover in this episode, Wick was originally envisioned as a Rambo-esque former boxer in his ‘60s. Scorn, as the film was originally titled, had a different backstory for the widowed assassin, a different ending and scenes that didn’t make the shooting script.
We spoke to Derek from his family home in Wisconsin to hear about the film’s evolution, the heartbreaking hidden tribute to his grandparents he snuck into John Wick, and the future of the character – a future that he’s decided to step away from. If you’re a fan of Marvel and the MCU, by the way, you might wanna stick around till the end for an intriguing update on Derek’s next project – The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from virtual co-working hosts Caveday – sign up for a free three-hour Cave using the promo code "SCRIPTAPART" at checkout.

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This week’s guest is Al Jean, long-time showrunner of The Simpsons and co-writer of 2007’s The Simpsons Movie. Homer, Lisa, Bart, Marge and Maggie’s big-screen debut was a long time in the making. By 2007, The Simpsons had been a global sensation for approaching 20 years. The show, about the escapades of an endearingly dysfunctional family, set in the fictional town of Springfield, had struck a cultural chord unlike any other. Its success, and the show’s constant references to cult classic movies, made the prospect of a Simpsons film seem a no-brainer.
Al and the Simpsons writing staff, however, were determined to wait for a Simpsons story that felt truly cinematic before bringing it to the big screen. In 2007 they found one. The Simpsons Movie took America’s favourite family on an adventure involving environmental catastrophe, epiphanies in the Alaskan wilderness and a giant glass dome being placed over Springfield. The film was as expected, a giant smash.
As season 31 of the show gets underway on TV, we caught up with Al to hear how creating the Simpsons Movie almost broke him, why he and the film’s writing team opted for a new villain instead of Hank Scorpio – and whether or not its environmental message foreshadowed our current climate crisis.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. 

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Armando Iannucci is one of the defining voices in British contemporary comedy. You might know him as the creator of Veep, the co-creator of Alan Partridge or as the writer-director behind 2017’s superb The Death of Stalin. Maybe you know him as the man responsible for acclaimed new HBO sci-fi show Avenue 5, or as the filmmaker behind the excellent recent Personal History of David Copperfield.
Armando is probably best known, however, for one character: Malcolm Tucker, the terrifying spin doctor at the black heart of BBC comedy The Thick of It. In 2009, Tucker hit the big screen. In the Loop, a spin-off movie about politicians in the US and UK scrambling for power as both countries contemplate a military invasion, left a massive imprint: not only did the film receive an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, but 11 years later, the film's referenced often, whenever politics spills into the absurd or surreal.
Armando joined us to explain how he and his Thick of It collaborators went about outlining and scripting In The Loop, the anarchic joy of writing dialogue for Malcolm Tucker, and why The Thick of It couldn’t exist in today’s political landscape. Oh and look out for a great tale about the time he committed a spot of light international espionage at the US State Department.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. 

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This week, we’re joined by David Rabinowitz and Charlie Wachtel, writers of 2018’s incredible BlacKkKlansman. Directed by the one and only Spike Lee, the film told the true-life tale of Ron Stallworth – a Black police detective working in 1970s Colorado, who attempted to infiltrate the white supremacist world of the KKK.
The movie walked away with Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2018 Oscars, and for good reason. BlacKkKlansman was tense, darkly comic and disturbingly relevant – famously, the film ends with real-life footage of recent racist rallies in America, drawing a line between the events on screen and the times we’re living in today.
Co-written by Lee and frequent collaborator Kevin Wilmot, the film’s a stylish, powerful thriller that speaks to violence and division of both Trump’s America and America’s past. We caught up with Charlie and David to hear about the racial fault lines they wanted the film to expose, the tricky task of laughing at bigots on screen without minimising their monstrousness, and the compelling character within the film that Jordan Peele secretly helped shape.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, screenwriters behind beloved films share with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. 

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Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are two childhood friends from Iowa who, in 2018, scored a box office smash with A Quiet Place – a sensory horror movie unlike anything before. Directed by John Krasinski, the movie was a post-apocalyptic alien survival story with a twist: after the Earth is invaded by creatures who prey on sound, we’re introduced to a family living out their their lives in silence on a remote farm, aware that the slightest noise could doom them all.
With an emotional undercurrent to match the film’s high concept, A Quiet Place was an almost unbearably tense rollercoaster ride – one that, between terrifying monster attacks, touched on topics of grief, loss and what it means to be a parent.
Beck and Woods told us all about how they wrote the hit movie, the car crash mystery they initially had propelling the movie, and the debt they owe to M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.
All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. 

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Adapted from an unpublished play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight was a mesmerising three-part journey through the young adult life of Chiron, a boy grappling with his identity and sexuality, played by three different actors representing different stages of his adolescence. The movie was the first LGBTQ-themed film to win Best Picture, the first with an all-black cast to win Best Picture, and is regularly voted among the greatest films of the century so far.
Barry wrote Moonlight’s first-draft on a solo trip to Europe, after discovering echoes of his own life in Tarell’s story. Like the playwright, he had grown up in Liberty City, raised by a mother with drug dependency issues. As he explains in our fascinating and at times emotional chat, Barry didn’t know where his life and career were leading before this screenplay spilled out of him on that trip, putting him on a path to Oscars glory.
Here’s Barry – and an incredibly well-behaved puppy he adopted before lockdown – on the origins of Moonlight, the LGBTQ legacy of the film’s success, and why his original ending for the film might have resulted in the actor Alex R. Hibbert being eaten by sharks.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.
All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. 

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Every now and again, we’re going to be spotlighting a new film or lesser-known gem that we love, chatting to the talented screenwriter behind it to uncover its first-draft secrets. This episode, we hear from Kelly O’Sullivan, writer/star of the affecting new indie-drama Saint Frances.
Saint Frances tells the story of 34-year-old Bridget, a reluctant nanny whose relationship with the smart, tough six-year-old in her care sends her on a moving journey of self-discovery. Kelly plays the lead role in the film as well as having written its fantastic screenplay. Funny, relatable and unflinchingly realistic, it’s rightly being championed as one of the year’s best movies.
Listen to find out what Kelly had to say about the film’s abandoned kidnapping plot twist, the sexist mainstream movie tropes she wanted Saint Frances to rebel against, and why imagining the life you might have had is a great exercise for storytellers. This is a spoiler-filled conversation so if you haven’t seen the film yet, you may want to do so first.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.
All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. 

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 If you went down to the woods in July 1999, you were in for a big surprise. The Blair Witch Project – our movie this week, one of the most notorious horror films in modern movie history – was a phenomenon that no one saw coming. Its reverberations are still being felt today, not just in horror but in movie-making at large. Is tale of a group of indie filmmakers out in the wilderness, making a documentary about a mythical witch, is credited with birthing the found footage genre – a huge staple of blockbuster filmmaking for decades to come. But maybe more importantly, the film announced to emerging storytellers that, in a new era of digital video and the internet, anyone could be a filmmaker, able to make and market a film to audiences. All you needed was imagination. 

The Blair Witch Project was written and directed by Daniel Myrick and our guest today, Eduardo Sánchez – two friends fresh out of film school. In the conversation you’re about to hear, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the movie, Ed looks back at the film’s conception. We get into what psychological tricks found footage as a format plays on the audience’s brain to heighten their sense of terror. And you’ll discover how deep mythology of the Blair Witch goes – a mythology that, as you’ll hear towards the end of our chat, isn’t finished scaring audiences yet.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft and WeScreenplay.

To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.

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There aren’t many first-time screenwriters who sit down to write a script, and soon find themselves on set with Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, bringing that script to life. That’s what happened to Liz Hannah on the back of her gripping screenplay for The Post, about America’s first female newspaper publisher, Katharine Graham, and her role in exposing one of the most notorious government cover-ups in US history.
Co-written by Josh Singer, the Steven Spielberg-directed film went on to become one of 2017’s most celebrated dramas – a nail-biting account of a woman facing an impossible decision, set in the 1970s but with a message relevant to our own era of fake news and democracy under attack.
We spoke to Liz about the movie’s journey from her kitchen table to Oscars acclaim, how she shaped the feminist story at the movie’s heart, and whether or not she foresees herself ever writing a spiritual sequel to The Post, about Donald Trump’s battles with our current media.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.
All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. 

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In 2009, David Hayter realised a decades-long dream: writing a movie adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal graphic novel, Watchmen. Co-written by Alex Tse, Hayter’s Watchmen told the story of retired superheroes in an alternate 1980s America. It was a gripping, morally complex deconstruction of society’s superhero obsession that ushered in a new era of caped crusader cinema.
With Watchmen back in the public consciousness thanks to last year’s fantastic HBO TV series, we spoke to Hayter to hear about the incredibly different film Watchmen almost was – directed by Paul Greengrass, set in modern day, with character deaths and story arcs that veered away from the graphic novel. Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.
All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. 

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In 2019, The Office co-creator Stephen Merchant scored a big-screen smash with Fighting With My Family – a heartfelt wrestling comedy set in Norwich, England. Telling the true-life tale of WWE athlete Paige, and the eccentric family of wrestling fanatics she left behind to chase her dream, the film was a critical and commercial hit – a fact that still surprises Merchant, a self-confessed wrestling novice who was asked to make the film by Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and soon found himself immersed in a world of suplexes, choke-slams and spandex.
He tells host Al Horner about how he wrote the acclaimed movie, the story threads that throw back to The Office, the title the film was almost given, and the parts of his first draft he opted to leave out of the final film.
Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.
All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. 

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Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.

All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.

In our first episode, host Al Horner chats to Joe Cornish about his 2011 sci-fi comedy Attack The Block. Joe tells us about how he wanted his script to challenge preconceptions about young (predominantly Black) teenagers living on council estates, the film's abandoned title, a slightly alternative ending and why he inserted more Brewis into his screenplay after this first attempt. We also discuss trips to buy weed with Louis Theroux, the power of John Boyega's recent Black Lives Matter London rally speech and the possibility of an Attack The Block sequel.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. 

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Today on Script Apart – another in our "Stage Apart" series about great plays! Our guest this week is a storyteller beloved across stage and screen, whose 2009 play Jerusalem is frequently referred to as the best play of the century so far. His acclaimed theatre productions includes 1995’s Mojo, 2012’s The River and 2019’s The Ferryman – but movie fans might know him better for films like Edge of Tomorrow, Ford v Ferrari, the James Bond movie Spectre and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. 

Yes, Jez Butterworth is here, discussing his triumphant return to London’s West End with The Hills of California, directed by Sam Mendes. The play tells the tale of a group of sisters reuniting in the faded seaside town they grew up in, aspiring towards musical stardom. Decades after the death of that particular dream, they’re left to reckon with what their lives became versus what they once imagined for themselves – with one painful secret no longer able to be confined to the past. It’s an incredibly moving and at times, hilarious meditation on regret, Britishness and the vultures that circle showbiz – inspired in part by Jez’s run-ins with disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, who the playwright once punched in the face.

In the spoiler-free conversation you’re about to hear, he tells us why he continues to gravitate towards  “death of a dream” stories. We also discuss how the experience of tragically losing his beloved sister informed the play, and have a beautifully vulnerable discussion about a period of Jez’s life in which his mental health was suffering – and how that intersected with his experience of working on Edge of Tomorrow. We hope you enjoy.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft and WeScreenplay.

To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.

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This week on Script Apart – a storyteller who began penning films like 28 Days Later and The Beach, before stepping behind the camera as the writer-director of stories that go to fascinating philosophical places, asking borderline unanswerable questions about humanity along the way.  Alex Garland's fourth time in the director's chair, Civil War, is his most explosive film yet – a film that riffs on America's intensely fractious present by imagining a future in which the country has torn itself in two.

The tale of a group of photojournalists – led by Kirsten Dunst’s Lee – travelling towards Washington as the country unravels is a tour de force on par with Ex Machina, Annihilation and other movies in Alex’s impressive filmography. But how does the movie connect (or decline to connect) to our current political landscape and what are the storytelling philosophies that continue to make Garland one of the most interesting filmmakers operating today? Find out by tuning in.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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This week on Script Apart, we’re broadcasting from the Upside Down. Yes, grab your Eggos and Metallica CDs for a special, spoiler-free conversation all about Stranger Things: The First Shadow – the first theatre production that we’ve covered on the show, as part of a new strand of episodes called "Stage Apart."

The First Shadow is a show that, as reviews have underlined, accomplishes things not thought possible in a play till now; as a spectacle, it's breathtaking in the way it conjures all manner of demogorgon-related chaos, live in front of you. But also staggering is what the show achieves as a piece of storytelling. Which is why this week, we’re delighted to be joined by the wonderful Kate Trefry – writer of a great many of the show’s best episodes, and writer of The First Shadow.

Working from a story created by Jack Thorne and show creators The Duffer Brothers, Kate penned The First Shadow as a prequel, pulling the curtain back on how and why the Upside Down came to Hawkins in the first place. Set in 1959, it introduces us to younger versions of fan favourite characters like Hopper, Joyce and Bob Newby, as a mystery unfolds in their sleepy hometown; beloved household pets are turning up not just dead but grotesquely disfigured. This spate of killing coincides not just with the production of a play at Hawkins High School that Joyce is directing, but also with the arrival of new kid Henry Creel – a kid that, those up to date with the latest season of Stranger Things will know, has a dark future he’s about to inherit.

Stranger Things is one of the biggest TV shows of the last decade by pretty much any metric and in the conversation you’re about to hear, we talk to Kate about why that is. We get into how the tale of Eleven, Hopper and co has become almost a new American myth – and discuss what The First Shadow does to extend and complicate that fable. Without giving anything away, we discuss how The First Shadow ties the horrors of the Upside Down to 1950s racism and America’ involvement in World War II. You’ll also hear about the supposed “real-life” incidents – including a horrifying alleged event called The Philadelphia Experiment – that intersect with what happens in Hawkins in the astounding The First Shadow. Listen out, also, for a tease at what season five has in store, as Stranger Things approaches its final ever episodes.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Welcome to another Script Club episode of Script Apart, in which storytellers we admire pick a film or show they love and talk about why it's special. Today, revered Folio Prize-winning author Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties, In The Dream House) breaks down the dystopian delights of Alfonso Cuarón's Children Of Men, co-written with Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby.

Based on a 1992 novel by P.D James, this 2006 action thriller forecast a Britain in the mid-2020s on the verge of collapse, governed by a party waging a cruel war on asylum seekers as a distraction from its problems. The UK may not currently be staring down a fertility crisis like the one depicted in Cuarón's film, but Children Of Men was, in other ways, eerily ahead of its time in some of its predictions.

In the spoiler conversation you're about to hear, Carmen shares what she finds so impactful about the tale, and the influence it has had on stories of her own, such as 2017's chilling Inventory.  Carmen is one of Al's favourite working writers, and someone whose work has been a north star in his own fiction, so we were delighted to have her on the show, breaking down a drama that only grows more relevant with each passing year.

** COME TO OUR FOURTH BIRTHDAY LIVE SHOW! Script Apart presents Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa with Neil and Rob Gibbons at Picturehouse Central, London – March 11th **

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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“We are what we survive.” That’s the message of Expats, the powerful new limited series from our guest this week, Lulu Wang. Lulu is a writer-director whose stories are unflinchingly intimate portraits of characters captivatingly full of contradictions. In this show, adapted from a novel by Janice Y.K. Lee, those characters are three women, different in age, class, personal circumstance and relationship to motherhood, who become linked by an unthinkable tragedy. These women’s stories combine to tell a tale of grief and privilege in a modern day Hong Kong battered by typhoon weather and simmering political dissent. And they do so movingly.

Lulu till now has been best known as the writer-director of 2019’s The Farewell, based on a radio story she wrote in 2016 for This American Life, about her own Chinese-American immigrant family. This follow-up to that breakout hit sounds like from the outset some kind of thriller: Nicole Kidman plays Margaret, an American living in Hong Kong whose youngest son disappears at a night market. Instead of a pulse-pounding pursuit, full of cops, clues and criminals like most abduction dramas, Expats instead unfolds at a meditative, mournful pace, against the backdrop of the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, celebrating the magnificent finale that dropped today, Lulu discusses about what happened to Margaret's child Gus, why the show refused to give an explanation for his disappearance and instead prioritised what it means to grieve; how grief doesn’t shrink, leaving us instead to grow around it.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Today on Script Apart, we're heading to Malia with Molly Manning Walker, writer-director of How To Have Sex. Since wowing audiences at Cannes last summer, the sun-sea-and-consent drama has proved a box office hit, been hailed as one of the strongest feature debuts by a British filmmaker in recent year and sparked long-overdue, nuanced conversations about the attitudes towards sex that young people inherit. The film  tells the tale of Tara, a sixteen-year-old played by Mia McKenna-Bruce, on a rite-of-passage summer holiday blowout with friends while she awaits school exam results. What begins as a sun-soaked adventure, full of borrowed hair straighteners, karaoke and bright-blue-coloured cocktails, soon becomes something bleaker when the girls meet a group of lads in the holiday rental apartment opposite them. Amid the thumping music and blinding lights of Malia’s club scene, a taboo-shattering expose of everything wrong with the way teenagers are encouraged to view sex unfolds – and it's absolutely heartbreaking.

Molly wrote the film while revisiting memories of going on a number of clubbing holidays herself between sixteen and eighteen, and realising what little room there was for discussion about the pressuring sexual elements of those trips and the harrowing experiences they can result in. When she was the victim of a sexual assault at age sixteen, she remembers “wanting to talk about it. But I’d walk into rooms and it would suck the air out of the room. How are people supposed to move on if no one’s allowed to talk about it?” How To Have Sex is a movie that does to talk about it – and does so movingly without ever lurching into lecturing or sentimentality.

In the spoiler-filled interview you’re about to hear, Molly break down key scenes from the film, including the heart-wrenching final exchange in the airport between Tara and Skye – what isn’t being said in that moment, and why. We talk about what she’s learned about how global the problems depicted in How To Have Sex are by the response to film beyond Britain – and how working on this film at the same time as Scrapper, Charlotte Regan’s brilliant surrealist comedy set out on a UK council estate – taught her about the necessity of female coming-of-age stories.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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American Fiction is two films at once – a farcical comedy take-down of white gatekeepers who only want one type of Black storytelling and a beautifully tender drama that underlines the richness possible when filmmakers of colour are allowed to operate outside of the boxes they’re often put in. Written and directed by Cord Jefferson, whose past writing credits include work on Succession, The Good Place and Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen TV adaptation, the film tells the tale of Monk, a frustrated academic played by Jeffrey Wright, who becomes an accidental literary sensation when a manuscript he writes as a joke, perpetuating Black stereotypes, becomes a best-seller. There’s sensitivity beneath the scathing satire of that premise, however: American Fiction is a movie that reels you in with its funny premise, then moves you to tears with its elegant portrait of a family as they search for meaning in grief and growing older.

In this spoiler conversation, Cord tells Al what struck him about Erasure, the 2001 novel by Percival Everett that American Fiction is an adaptation of. We get into the personal experiences that helped him relate powerfully to Percival’s story – and what inspired the changes from page to screen, such as the omission of a storyline involving a murder by an abortion protestor. Listen out, also, for what Cord has to say about the film’s meta ending and the symbolism behind the enigmatic image that closes the film. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Alienation, abandonment and dislocated shoulders: not really your usual ingredients for a tender festive heart-warmer. But then again, The Holdovers – unequivocally one of our favourite films of the last twelve months – isn’t your average Christmas movie. Directed by Alexander Payne and written by our guest today, the brilliant David Hemingson, it's a drama steeped in the pain of reaching the so-called “most wonderful time of the year” and feeling nothing but loneliness.

The film tells the story of three loners thrown together by circumstance over the  Christmas break at a New England boarding school, each disillusioned with a world that doesn't seem to want them. They have their differences. One – Paul, played by Paul Giamatti – is a miserly middle-aged academic with an odour problem. Another – Angus, played by newcomer Dominic Sessa – is a brash student of his, on the brink of being sent to military school. The third and possible heartbeat of the movie, Da'Vine Joy Randolph's Mary Lamb, is their school cook – a woman who recently lost everything. These characters find a richness in each other that's uplifting without ever feeling schmaltzy or sentimental. It's a staggeringly beautiful film.

In the spoiler conversation you're about to hear, David tells us about Uncle Earl, the real-life family member he based the character Paul on. You'll hear how his first draft involved a woman Paul used to date with porcelain fingers, after injuring her hand in a car accident. We also spend some time debating the words "not for ourselves alone are we born" – the lesson, if there is one, of The Holdovers, and a mantra we could all doing with reminding ourselves of more in our fragmented 2024.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Unless you’ve spent the last year locked in a radiation-proof vault deep below the surface of the Earth, you’ll have no doubt heard about Fallout – a TV video game adaptation unlike any other. Created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and our guest today, former Portlandia writer Graham Wagner, the show brought to life the blue suits, barbarism and bizarre humour of one of the biggest game franchises of the century so far, transporting viewers to a nuclear-scored Wasteland hundreds of years in the future. The surprises of this Prime Video series, produced by Westworld creators Jonathan “Jonah” Nolan and Lisa Joy, just kept coming across the eight episodes comprising its first season, with each revelation a powerful observation about the greedy workings of corporations to whom nothing’s more important than their profits – not even human survival.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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This week we're joined by writer-director Andrew Haigh, whose new metaphysical drama All Of Us Strangers is a bruise in movie form: all swirling blue and purple hues, symbolic of hurt and longing to heal. The film tells the tale of a quiet screenwriter named Adam, played by Andrew Scott, who lives in a lonely London tower block, divorced from the world. His only neighbour is Harry, played by Paul Mescal, who one night makes a drunken move on Adam, only to be turned down. Instead, we follow Adam as he boards a train and visits his childhood home. The unexpected reunion that follows takes the film on a dream-like turn representative of the scars he still wears as a gay man who grew up in conservative 1980s Britain. As the drama goes on, that dream quickly curdles into a nightmare.

In the spoiler conversation you're about to hear, Al speaks to Andrew about the "aloneness" rather than loneliness that powers All Of Us Strangers. We get into the construction of its devastating twists, the process of adapting the 1987 Japanese novel on which it's based, the meaning of the pop music threaded into the house and the catharsis of writing this powerhouse story – one that audiences have found themselves unable to shake for weeks after viewing.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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The acclaimed new Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro is about more than just the life and times of arguably America’s most famous composer. It’s about the idea of genius and what allowances those in the presence of gifted creatives sometimes permit, at great personal cost, to allow that artistry to flourish. Starring Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper, who also directs, the film’s another example of the supreme storytelling talents of Josh Singer – a screenwriter renowned for telling the true-life tales of people who sent ripples through our culture for decades to come. 

In the Oscar-winning Spotlight, it was a team of Boston journalists who exposed a church cover-up. In Damien Chazelle’s First Man, it was astronaut Neil Armstrong – the first man on the moon. When it comes to writing dramatically compelling, non-sensationalised biopics, you won’t find many better. In our latest episode, the 51-year-old breaks down his latest exploration of a public figure and the demons hidden beneath the surface of his fame. It’s a fascinating spoiler conversation about how and Bradley Cooper co-wrote the script, spanning the meaning of its ambiguous title and how he approached the movie’s devastating ending.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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This week, we're joined by the great Ari Aster –  one of the boldest and most enigmatic voices in American cinema right now. He’s a filmmaker that Al first met in May 2019. The New York-born writer-director’s debut horror, Hereditary, was a few months old at the time, and Ari was deep in the edit for Midsommar at the time. Al had been sent by Empire Magazine to write a profile that championed him as a new king of horror. Which made sense in the moment: Midsommar, his Wicker Man-esque follow-up to Hereditary, about a Swedish cult, promised more frights, more decapitations.

One problem, though. Ari rejected the idea of himself as a horror filmmaker. He kept emphasising to Al, in his quiet, charming way, that horror wasn’t where his heart was. At least, not exclusively. No, Ari longed to make a comedy. A comedy musical, if possible. What would a comedy musical by this filmmaker, best known for chilling audiences to the bone, look like? In 2023, we got our audience – the jaw-dropping Beau Is Afraid.

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Beau Is Afraid is indeed a comedy. Its punchline just happens to speak to the existential treadmill-to-nowhere that life can sometimes resemble. It may not have songs to qualify it as a musical, but its case is populated by icons of musical theatre, known for their stage work (Nathan Lane, Richard Kind). Following a middle aged man on an Oedipal trip through an absurdist America en route to his mother’s funeral, the movie began life as a short film in 2011. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, we get into what evolved from Ari’s initial vision for Beau, as the character made his way to the big-screen. We talk about how in early drafts, the orphans of the forest weren’t a theatre group but a cult – something Ari had to change when he realised his first two movies had dealt heavily with cults and he couldn’t go three-for-three. We also discuss the horror and hilarity of the monster in the attic and what the religious iconography of the movie represents in Beau’s journey.

It’s a riveting peek into the mind of a filmmaker out here making films unlike anyone else. We hope you enjoy.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Today on the show – a movie in which Emma Stone attempts to punch a baby, by a playwright and screenwriter whose stories never fail to pack a punch. Yes, Tony McNamara is here, talking all things Poor Things, his latest collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos. Having previously worked together on the ten-time Oscar-nominated historical comedy The Favourite in 2018, this awards-tipped odyssey is a Frankensteinian creation as beguiling and impossible to pin down as its protagonist, Bella Baxter. It’s part coming-of-age comedy, part sexual conquest and part travelogue through an eye-popping steampunk planet both like and unlike our own. You might also classify it as a father-daughter drama – except here, the father is a mad scientist whose home is a cornucopia of unholy experiments, his daughter, played by Emma Stone, just one of them.

Stone is astounding as Bella, a reanimated dead woman, whose body, dragged from the Thames, has had life breathed into it once more. The horny journey of self-discovery that the character goes on from there, adapted from a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, comments on our culture’s (male-driven) obsession with control, explains Tony in our conversation. It’s a riveting chat with a storyteller whose other screen credits include creating the TV show The Great, loosely based on Empress Catherine the Great of Russia’s rise to power in 18th century Saint Petersburg and 2021’s Cruella. Listen out for insights on the changes made to Gray’s novel, the scene that Yorgos and Tony sadly had to cut for time, the idea of sex as a liberating force for the film’s main character and what each of the new lands Bella visits are meant to bring out of her evolving character. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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On October 13, 1972, a plane carrying 45 passengers and crew – 19 of whom were young rugby players – took off from Carrasco International Airport in Uruguay heading to Santiago, Chile. The plane never reached its destination. Adverse weather conditions caused Flight 571 to crash into a mountain ridge, ripping the aircraft in two over the Andes mountains – one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Those who didn’t die immediately in the wreckage – the so-called lucky ones – faced unimaginable horror. For 72 days, these survivors, aged between 19 and 26, endured frostbite and an avalanche. They watched as, one by one, friends and teammates perished in the plummeting temperatures each night. Starving to death in this endless white abyss, the passengers of Flight 571 were forced to do the unthinkable to survive, resorting to eating the bodies of the deceased as a means of desperately clinging to life.

You probably know all this, because the story of the Miracle in the Andes as it became known is a story that’s been told many times before, in books, films, documentaries and TV shows. What happened – how 16 people not only survived, but forged their own rescue – is well-known. How it actually felt to be out there in the wilderness, though – the philosophical and spiritual conundrums the survivors faced – has never really been truly translated to screen until now.

Society Of The Snow – directed and co-written by our guest today, the great J.A. Bayona – is a drama that finds transcendence in the true-life tale of Flight 571. Yes, the film abides by the facts of what went down in that frosty mountain range across those agonising 72 days – Bayona spent hundreds of hours interviewing the survivors before penning the movie’s screenplay with his co-writers Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego. But more importantly, inspired by a great book – La Sociedad de la Nieve by Pablo Vierci – it takes a lyrical approach to the story. One bordering on the metaphysical, full of dialogues between the living and the dead.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, JA tells us what it is about tales of people forced to confront the full might of nature that he finds himself drawn to as a storyteller (his previous films include tsunami drama The Impossible and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which had similar themes nature versus man). We talk about crafting the plane crash scene on the page, the bold decision he made involving the narrator of the tale and why the film doesn’t end on a note of triumph but something more melancholy. If you haven’t seen Society Of The Snow yet, be sure to hit pause now, watch on Netflix then come back as we dive into every detail.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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In our final episode of 2023, Michael Arndt – the acclaimed writer of films like Little Miss Sunshine and Star Wars: The Force Awakens – drops by for a two-hour dissection of his script for Toy Story 3 –a Pixar sequel that went to infinity and beyond when it came to thrills, laughter and emotion.  

Directed by past Script Apart guest Lee Unkrich, the 2010 film could have repeated the formula that made past the franchise’s previous films a global phenomenon, making instant icons out of Woody, Buzz and their found-family of fellow play-things. Instead, it leapt forward in time to find Andy, the toys’ owner, all-grown up and about to head to college, heaping huge existential questions on fans’ beloved characters. If a toy is retired to an attic, never to be played with again, what is their reason to be? What does it mean to be outgrown by people you love, who no longer love you in return?

If that sounds heavy for what is ostensibly a kids’ tale, wait till we remind you that Toy Story 3 was a movie set mostly in a brutal toy internment camp that ends with our heroes about to be incinerated. That boldness is why many regard the film as being “peak Pixar” – and can you blame them? Toy Story 3 capped a remarkable run of hits for the animation studio that included Ratatouille in 2007, Wall-E in 2008 and Up in 2009. No wonder Michael and co felt emboldened to take risks on this third instalment of the franchise – risks that reaped incredible storytelling rewards.

Michael was picked by Pixar – presumably via email or a phone call, rather than a giant mechanical claw like the ones in Pizza Planet – because few storytellers do grounded emotion and dysfunctional families like he does. At the onset of his career, across three days in May 2000, he’d written a screenplay about a family on a road trip to New Mexico that became a monster hit. Little Miss Sunshine earned the Virginia-born screenwriter a Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2006 and catapulted him onto the radar of Pixar, whose brain trust would soon begin cooking up a story for a third movie in their Toy Story franchise.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Michael breaks down the many early iterations of this movie, including an abandoned Toy Story 3 from before his time on the project, in which the toys travel to Taiwan after Buzz is shipped there following a global product recall on the toy. We get into the machinations of Lotso Huggin’ Bear, how the story is deep down one about parenthood and of course, that traumatising moment our heroes hold hands, staring down certain death.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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On today’s episode, an interview at the end of a TV show: A Murder At The End Of The World. That’s right, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij are with us, breaking down every detail of their phenomenal techno-thriller whodunnit, which reached its breathtaking conclusion last night. As we’ve come to expect from the creators of head-spinning drama The OA – which felt like the signalling of a bold new era of ambitious narrative television when it hit screens in 2016 – A Murder At The End Of The World was a triumph of both ideas and emotion. Few filmmakers today combine both as seamlessly and elegantly as Brit and Zal, whose latest show offered meditations on the following: artificial intelligence, online misogyny, the desensitisation in our culture around violence towards women, extreme wealth, climate crisis, the deification of tech company CEOs… the list goes on.

The fact that A Murder At The End Of The World can so smartly probe all those topics without ever toppling in on itself like a house of cards in an Icelandic snow storm is an incredible feat. The fact that all those big intellectual ideas never overshadow the emotion of the show – the journey we go on Emma Corin’s courageous hacker Darby Hart – is even rarer. Darby’s story, zigzagging across three different periods of her life, is the heartbeat of this tale, about a group of high-achievers and industry leaders invited to a mysterious retreat among the frozen fjords of the Fljot Valley. The aim of this gathering? To solve the challenges facing humanity, its tech billionaire host Andy Ronson explains. A slight snag in that plan emerges, though, when one by one, guests begin to be bumped off in terrifying ways. Only Darby can solve the mystery of the killer’s identity.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Zal and Brit discuss philosophies behind the show, the world war origins of the whodunit genre, the ethical way to approach violence against women on screen without perpetuating that violence in the real world, and of course, the revelations of the show’s final episode. As ever, this is a spoiler-filled interview, so if you haven’t watched A Murder At The End Of The World in full, please be sure to catch up before tuning in.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Something sinister simmers beneath the surface of suburbia in Eileen, a psychological thriller about pent-up desire, parental neglect and escaping the shackles of the life expected of us. It’s a story that first existed as a novel, launching the literary career of Boston-born author Ottessa Moshfegh in 2015. Since then, Ottessa’s career has skyrocketed: novels like Lapvona and the tremendous My Year of Rest and Relaxation have seen her lauded as one of her generation’s most exciting voices. Or as the fantastic Jia Tolentino once described her, “easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive, when being alive feels terrible.”

Through all that success, though, Eileen has followed her. The character, a secretary at a correctional facility for teenage boys in a small American town, lost in time, never quite left her side in all that time, and in the new film adaptation of her story – penned with husband and screenwriting partner Luke Goebel – it shows. The movie, directed by William Oldroyd, stars Thomasin McKenzie as Eileen and Anne Hathaway as the older woman, Rebecca, she becomes enchanted by. The closer they get, though, the closer Eileen gets to a dark truth involving one of the young inmates at the prison where she works.

On this week’s show, Ottessa and Luke take time out on a recent trip to London to break down their screenplay and take us inside the mind of the film’s Hitchcockian anti-heroine. Ottessa recounts the parts of herself she left on the page when she initially wrote the story, while Luke – a great author in his own right, whose Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours collection is a brilliant read – unravels the meanings of key scenes as he sees them. We also crucially debate whether the festive backdrop of this film – all snow and fairy lights, to the tune of constant carols –  makes this a Christmas movie. This is a spoiler conversation, as ever on Script Apart, so do be sure to check out the movie, in cinemas now, before tuning in.  

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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May December – written by our guest this week, Samy Burch – tells the serpentine tale of a TV actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) who descends upon the home of a family founded on scandal. Two decades have passed since Gracie, portrayed by Julianne Moore, and her now-husband Joe, played by Charles Melton, hit the headlines after beginning a relationship when Gracie was in her mid-thirties and Joe was just thirteen years old. Elizabeth, researching the couple ahead of a film based on their lives, joins the couple (now married with kids) and attempts to understand what makes them each tick. In the process, she discovers that debris still remains from the tabloid storm that engulfed their lives. And we, as an audience, discover that Elizabeth herself has exploitative, machiavellian tendencies of her own.

It’s a story that Samy wrote in 2019 after landing on the idea with her partner, Alex Mechanik. “What would make a 36-year-old woman start an affair with a seventh grader?” you may be wondering – in which case, you’re not alone. Gracie’s former husband echoes those exact words in the film. But May December isn’t interested in answering that – not declaratively, at least. This is a film that refuses absolutes, asking more questions than it answers. 

Does the twenty years of stability and apparent happiness that Joe and Gracie have shared together justify the wrongs of how their relationship began? Does the family life they’ve built paper over how predatory and problematic Gracie’s behaviour was, in initiating a sexual partnership with a kid whose voice must only just have broken? And what does it say about us, that as a culture, we’re so drawn to the transgressions of people like Gracie? Are we as parasitic as the prying actress who dismantles their lives, almost on a whim? These are all questions left to us to ponder after its credits roll. They’re also questions that Samy was delighted to give her take on, in my revealing conversation with the first-time screenwriter. Spoilers ahead, so be sure to watch the fantastic May December first before tuning in.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Today on Script Apart – a film about a man trapped in an air-conditioned purgatory, full of fast food joints, luggage carousels and people in transit, while he himself remains frustratingly locked in place. 2004’s The Terminal is the Steven Spielberg-directed tale of Viktor, played by Tom Hanks: a kind-hearted soul marooned at an American airport owing to a unique diplomatic situation that broke out his fictional home country, Krahkozia, while he was flying to the US. The film was written by our guest today, Sacha Gervasi, who you might also know from movies like the music documentary Anvil and the Peter Dinklage-starring My Dinner With Herve, as well as the 2012 Alfred Hitchcock biopic with Anthony Hopkins.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Sacha and I get into what The Terminal taps into that gave it such universal appeal on release, twenty years later and also notably during the pandemic, when people were confined to their own purgatories in lockdown. You’ll discover the darker tone of the original draft of the movie, written for Sam Mendes to direct before a reshuffle behind the scenes. And you’ll discover what the film sought to express about the arbitrary nature of borders, as well as the truth behind the real-life inspiration for the film: Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who lived in Charles De Gaulle airport for eighteen difficult years.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight… and if you can do all that while listening to The Smiths, even better. That’s the mantra of the eponymous assassin at the heart of The Killer, directed by David Fincher and written by our guest today  – the fantastic Andrew Kevin Walker. 

The Killer is a movie that deconstructs the hitman movie genre like Michael Fassbender’s glassy-eyed gun-for-hire deconstructing a McDonald’s sandwich on a park bench in Paris. It opens with a blaze of images that tease the explosive action typical of these films then swerves in a different direction. The result is a defiantly meditative two hours in which the violence of the movie’s revenge plot is almost incidental to the character’s meticulous ways and detached observations about the world.

It’s an absolutely riveting watch but then again, what did we expect? Unlike The Killer himself – who misses his target early on in the film, sparking the film’s descent into chaos – Andrew and Fincher rarely miss their mark whenever they work together. The pair first teamed up on 1995’s Se7en, which began life as a spec script that Andrew wrote after moving to New York from suburban Pennsylvania. Since then, Andrew’s taken passes at Fight Club and The Game for Fincher, on top of his solo adventures in Hollywood, penning films like Sleepy Hollow and 2022’s excellent Windfall.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Andy answers our questions about the subtle commentary on materialist culture woven into the film. We get into the influence of the novelist Somerset Maugham on Andy’s work and break some of the film’s most intriguing moments, including its enigmatic ending – in which a life is spared but existential questions loom.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Can you find the wolves in this podcast? Our guest today, Eric Roth, is the Academy Award-winning writer behind films like Forrest Gump. He wrote The Insider for Michael Mann, Munich for Steven Spielberg, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for David Fincher and 2018’s A Star Is Born for Bradley Cooper, and two years ago, we had the delight of his company as we broke down his script for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune on this very show. Today, we're joined by him once more to discuss what – whisper it – may just be his crowning accomplishment.

Few films this year have left the extraordinary imprint left behind by Killers of the Flower Moon – a tale of love, murder and quite-literally-poisonous greed in 1920s America, directed by Martin Scorsese. Eric’s script for the film, which he co-wrote with the beloved auteur, was adapted from a non-fiction book by author David Grann, but with a very different approach to the story told in that tome. The book investigated a series of killings of members of the indigenous Osage Nation – deaths caused, then covered up, by white men who coveted their oil-rich land. At the heart of all this was a woman: Mollie Kyle, played in the film by Lily Gladstone, who marries a first world war veteran named Ernest Burkhart, played by Leo DiCaprio.

Ernest had a corrupt uncle, William King Hale, portrayed by Robert DeNiro, who masqueraded as an upstanding member of the community. Molly was forced to watch in horror as at least 24 family members and friends were systematically killed as a result of Hale’s scheming – unaware that her uncle-in-law was masterminding these deaths and unaware that the man she loved was helping him.

Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, however,  was subtitled “the birth of the FBI” for a reason – it focused on the white law enforcement response to the killings rather than the Osage Nation itself. As you’ll discover in this episode, Eric’s first draft of this movie adaptation followed suit – before he and Scorsese realised they had a responsibility to navigate this tale from a different perspective. It wasn’t as simple as making Molly the lead. That story, as non-indigenous filmmakers, Scorsese has implied, wasn’t theirs to tell. Instead, they set about making a film about complicity that would centre Ernest in all his cowardice and employ Molly as the movie’s moral heart.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, we break down all of the film’s key scenes, uncover some fascinating details about its first draft and break down the meaning of the movie’s astounding finale – a moment on film unlike anything else in Scorsese’s filmography. Eric, as ever, was a total pleasure to chat with: a storyteller so inspiringly in love with what he does, that at 78-years-old, there’s no sign of him slowing down. Writing screenplays is simply what he does.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Film history is full of troublesome hotels, isn’t it? A few of them we've even covered on this very show, from the haunted Overlook in The Shining to the labyrinthine, unsettling Airbnb in Barbarian – the kinds of places that make you vow to never complain about a Premier Inn again. This week, revered writer-director Kitty Green releases a thriller that adds to that long list with the sublime The Royal Hotel – an at times unbearably tense exploration of gender and toxic masculinity, set in rural Australian. On today’s episode of Script Apart, Kitty stops by for a spoiler breakdown of the movie, in which two young women in need of money check into a dilapidated pub in a remote mining town. What happens next, as the line is blurred between drunken boys-will-be-boys and truly dangerous behaviour, is impossible to tear your eyes away from, beautifully written and impeccably directed.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Kitty tells us about her own family connections to the mining town pub culture depicted in the film, which was co-written with Oscar Redding. We unpack what’s going on in the heads of the film’s two leads, Hannah and Liv, as they encounter some of the community’s many microaggressions towards them. She also breaks down the film’s connections to her last movie, The Assistant, and what the two dramas combined express about the epidemic of male violence towards women. 

Please be sure to check out the film before listening as this episode has more spoilers than you can shake a taxidermied snake at.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. But when it comes to Bottoms – the new queer high school comedy from Emma Seligman, in which two teen lesbians start their own Fincher-esque Fight Club in an attempt to get closer to cheerleaders – well, there's really no helping it. 

On today's episode of Script Apart, the acclaimed filmmaker breaks down an early version of the smash hit new movie that began with our heroes, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (The Bear star Ayo Edebiri) “masturbating at a militaristic boot camp for horny girls.” In this version of the film,  a steroid epidemic that "causes people to hate women" was wreaking havoc at Rockbridge Falls High, with it up to PJ and Josie to save the day.

Listen to our spoiler conversation with Emma to discover the thematic connections between Bottoms and her groundbreaking debut Shiva Baby,  the inspiration behind fragile football star Jeff, her process of writing the script with Sennott and much, much more.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from MUBI, ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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This week, we're delighted to be reunited with the talented Jeff Rowe, who first appeared on the show in 2021, breaking down his and Mike Rianda’s hilarious The Mitchells vs the Machines. On today’s episode, the animation auteur returns to talk all things Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The heroes in a half shell returned earlier this year in Mutant Mayhem, which Jeff directed from a script he co-wrote with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The film packed laughter,  action and emotion unlike any Turtles film before it – a result of the trio approaching the story as a coming-of-age tale, inspired by films like Ladybird and Stand By Me.

The story behind how Turtles was written is almost as radical as the movie itself. Jeff, Seth and Evan worked hard on one version of the film only to realise fairly far into production that the story was “fundamentally broken.” So, they got together and across a whirlwind, high-pressure 48 hours, wrote an entirely new story for this Turtles reboot.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Jeff and I discuss that discarded version of the film in which the iconic villain Shredder was a “Vince Vaughn type” wreaking havoc on New York. There’s thorough analysis of all the key scenes in the film, and Jeff opens about his difficult family life growing up and how it fed into the story he wanted to tell here, about the beauty of found families.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Stowe Story Labs and WeScreenplay.

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This episode is part of our Storyteller Sessions event – a weekend of career-spanning conversations with game-changing storytellers, raising money for the Entertainment Community Fund. If you enjoy this episode or any of the episodes still to come across this weekend, please do consider donating via the link below:

Donate to our fundraiser here!

Gillian Flynn is an author, screenwriter and showrunner who delights in writing what she calls “bad women” – fascinatingly flawed female characters who she grants the freedom to kill, lie, harm and harass in a way that sometimes ruffles feathers. Take her 2012 novel Gone Girl, for example, which she later adapted into a smash hit movie with David Fincher. That murder-mystery tale of a marriage steeped in deceit captivated the world and sparked near-endless conversation about the poison and/or empowerment of its main character, Amy Dunne.

That novel and movie – released within two years of each other – didn't just make Flynn a literary darling. It also catapulted her to the summit of film and TV. In 2018, she co-wrote the brilliant Widows with Steve McQueen, and adapted her first novel, Sharp Objects, into a gloriously slow-burning limited series starring Amy Adams. Since then, she’s won cult acclaim for her streaming adaptation of Utopia, the British Channel 4 series.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, we ask Gillian how she pens her captivating characters and the social importance of allowing women to run riot on-screen and in her novels, the way that male anti-heroes are frequently permitted to do. She reflects on the accusations of misogyny that her work attracted from some female writers in the aftermath of Gone Girl’s release and reveals an alternative ending to that story that would have taken the tale of Nick and Amy Dunne in an entirely different direction.

Again, this conversation is in aid of the Entertainment Community Fund, who do extraordinary work lifting up storytellers of all descriptions and have been a vital support for entertainment industry workers affected by this summer’s strike action. If you enjoy this episode, please do consider clicking the link in the show notes and donating any amount you can to this great cause.

It was a huge privilege to share this conversation with Lilly who we can’t thank enough for her openness and insights. Again, this conversation is in aid of the Entertainment Community Fund, who do extraordinary work lifting up storytellers of all descriptions and have been a vital support for entertainment industry workers affected by this summer’s strikes. If you enjoy this episode, please do consider donating via the link below:

Donate to our fundraiser here!

Support the show

This episode is part of our Storyteller Sessions event – a weekend of career-spanning conversations with game-changing storytellers, raising money for the Entertainment Community Fund. If you enjoy this episode or any of the episodes still to come across this weekend, please do consider donating via the link below:

Donate to our fundraiser here!

On today’s episode – a conversation about writing with the incredible Lilly Wachowski. Or at least, we were meant to speak about writing. The plan was to talk about Lilly's creative practice. About the queer-coded stories of collective resistance and love in the face of dystopia that she’s told across a glittering three-decade career. One of those stories in particular – The Matrix trilogy, co-written and directed with her sister Lana Wachowski – was the looking glass through which Al stepped into a new way of seeing both cinema and the world when he was eleven-years-old, so you can imagine his excitement to discuss her relationship with the page.

That is not what went down. Yes, there's plenty in our conversation about how Lilly approaches writing. About why she prioritises telling stories not about individualist heroes, but about communities coming together to defy power. About how writing film and TV right now a release valve for the filmmaker, helping her channel her “trans rage” at a system that tramples over marginalised groups. You’ll also hear her discuss why she believes great stories can offer an escape path for audiences out of that system. 

But that’s not all we talked about. Across a hugely moving two-hours, Lilly explains how, when she looks back on her and Lana’s early movies today, she sees clearly the “scratchings on the wall as they were clawing their way out the closet.” She speaks beautifully about her experience transitioning and about how she found her way back to herself after a period of burnout and about the amazing women around her growing up that she credits with shaping her.  

Listen out for candid discussion about the “impossible bar” that The Matrix set for her and Lana, and Lilly’s thoughts on A.I in 2023, as someone who co-created one of our culture’s defining works about that technology. You'll also hear about the joy of her experience on Work In Progress,  and why the next chapter of her career is going to be all about “throwing my trans body against the mono culture that Hollywood is gravitating towards.” 

It was a huge privilege to share this conversation with Lilly who we can’t thank enough for her openness and insights. Again, this conversation is in aid of the Entertainment Community Fund, who do extraordinary work lifting up storytellers of all descriptions and have been a vital support for entertainment industry workers affected by this summer’s strikes. If you enjoy this episode, please do consider donating via the link below.

Donate to our fundraiser here!

Support the show

Welcome to the Script Apart Storyteller Sessions – three days of career-spanning conversations with truly game-changing storytellers, talking about their relationship with the page. 100% of proceeds are going to the Entertainment Community Fund, a brilliant charity doing hugely important work – so if you enjoy this episode or any of the episodes across this weekend, please do consider hitting the link below and donating to that wonderful cause:

Donate to our fundraiser here!

Today, we’re kicking off with what is basically the Catalina Wine Mixer of podcast interviews. Our guest today is a filmmaker responsible for some of the great comedies of our time, and someone whose storytelling has undergone a fascinating transformation as the world has slipped into climate emergency, economic emergency and political disrepair. Somehow, in a time with dwindling things to laugh about, this writer-director has found a way to engage with those crises in ludicrously entertaining ways. He's the filmmaker behind Anchorman, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, The Other Guys, The Big Short, Vice and Don’t Look Up – it's Adam McKay!

Adam got his break on Saturday Night Live, becoming the show’s head writer in 1996. His collaborations on SNL with another emerging comic, Will Ferrell, immediately caught the eye and simply could not be contained to the small screen for long. By the early ‘00s, the pair had turned their anarchic chemistry into a wave of outrageously quotable comedies that fast found themselves woven into our shared pop culture landscape. “It escalated quickly,” as Ron Burgundy might say.

Then came a change of pace. In 2015, after his father lost his home as part of a devastating economic downturn, Adam released The Big Short – a white collar crime comedy about the 2007 financial crash. It won him and his co-writer Charles Randolph the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards, and signalled a sea change not just in the content of Adam’s movies going forward, but also in the cinematic language he was using to tell his stories. His films since then – and to a lesser degree, titles he’s worked on as a producer, such as the smash hit Succession –  have doubled down on that new storytelling style, full of frantic edits and experimental flourishes.

Adam’s monumental success has come in the face of a couple of challenging moments medically across his life. In 2000, he was diagnosed with a condition known as essential tremor, and in 2017, he suffered a heart attack on the set of Vice. In the conversation you’re about to hear, we discuss how that heart attack sharpened his resolve to make 2021’s bracing Don’t Look Up. We get into why Step Brothers is a film that “tells you all you need to know about America” – a nation in which “consumer culture has turned us into children,” Adam insists. You’ll hear why he decided to abandon the three-act structure of his old films in part as a response to the rise of Donald Trump and what he’s learned about to fix the world from his recent string of movies grappling with its many problems.

The Entertainment Community Fund do extraordinary work lifting up storytellers of all descriptions, and have been a vital support for entertainment industry workers affected by this summer’s strike action. So if you enjoy this episode, please do consider donating below.

Donate to our fundraiser here!

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This week on Script Apart, the writers behind Pixar’s latest heartwarming spectacle take us down to Element City where the tree people are green and the Vivisteria Flowers are pretty. Yes, today we’re joined by Kat Likkel and John Hoberg, the husband-and-wife duo whose script for Elemental – co-written with Brenda Hsueh and director Pete Sohn – has been enchanting audiences all summer.

The film a hugely affecting tale whose premise, on first glance, looked to have a certain shared DNA with past Pixar hits. One popular internet theory suggests that the studio’s best-known films all ask variations of the same question: “What if X abstract concept – toys, cars, monsters, rats – had feelings?” Elemental, though, is more than a movie about elements with emotions. It’s a family drama about parental expectation. It’s an immigrant tale, about the struggle to assimilate into a new society while keeping your own culture alive. It’s a romantic comedy – When Harry Met Sally with fire and water. And it’s also a disaster movie that takes side-swipes at how structural racism leads to minority communities being put in harm’s way.

In this week’s episode, Kat and John join us to discuss an early draft of the movie, in which Elemental was shaping up to be Pixar’s answer to Chinatown. The finished film follows fire element Ember as she fights to save her father’s shop from closure, with the help of Wade, a water element working as a city inspector. Along the way, they uncover a leak in the city's canals emanating from a problem with a nearby dam, neglected by authorities. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, however, John and Kat explain how Wade’s mother was initially intended to be the film’s shock antagonist, orchestrating an evil cover-up. We talk about how Ember was originally written with much more of a Disney princess vibe before being retooled as an older, more streetwise character. And we uncover the meaning and power of “the bow” – a motif in the movie that ends up becoming one of Elemental’s final, most emotionally devastating shots. Get fired up – this is a fun and fascinating deep dive into one of the year’s best animations.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from MUBI, ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Think of your worst experience with online dating – the most excruciating Hinge disaster or Tinder catastrophe. However bad you might think that ordeal was, it’s nothing on the tale told in the extraordinary recent indie I Love My Dad. Part cringe comedy, part family drama and part horror movie for the MySpace generation, the film followed a screw-up father who’s desperate to reconnect with the child he pushed away. Blocked on social media, this father – Chuck, played by Patton Oswalt – resorts to posing online as a beautiful young waitress whose friend request his estranged son will surely accept. The scheme is soon complicated, however, when the teenager begins to fall for this stranger in his DMs, growing determined to meet her in person.

That premise – a teenager cat-fished by his own father – might sound like the logline for a zany, high-concept Hollywood romp, but what’s so special about I Love My Dad is how grounded it is in the loneliness of being a certain age and desperate for connection. The lure of the internet, the versions of ourselves we present online and the sometimes unhealthy fantasies that permits – these questions are all explored in the film by the film’s outrageously talented writer, director and star, James Morosini, who it was a delight to chat with for this week’s episode.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, James explains how I Love My Dad has such an air of emotional truth to it because, well, “this actually happened” to quote the film itself. There are ways in which James’ story deviates from the one in the film but yes – his father really did cat-fish him in real-life, in events that inspired his screenplay. We discuss Age, Sex, Location – the title of James’ first draft of the film – and why an early ending in which Chuck has a heart attack and Franklin gets together with the real-life Becca had to go. It’s a fascinating conversation about the inherent performance of social media – how we’re all cat-fishing one another to less explicit degrees – and why running towards our most embarrassing moments and most vulnerable parts of ourselves, rather than running away, makes for great storytelling.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from MUBI, ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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This week on Script Apart – a sit-down on a proverbial park bench to pick through the box of chocolates that is Forrest Gump, with the legendary screenwriter behind the classic drama, Eric Roth! Marking the film's 30th anniversary, Roth regales us with secrets from the Gump's creation, breaking down why he elected not to make Forrest a NASA astronaut (unlike in the book on which it's based) and what makes the character so enduringly endearing.

You'll also discover how the relationship between Forrest and Jenny was informed by Eric's own love for his wife, what the feather at the beginning of the film represents, and what happened to the ill-fated sequel that Roth wrote – only to abandon in the days after 9/11.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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Judd Apatow needs little in the way of introduction. He’s a filmmaker synonymous with an entire era of American comedy – that mid-’00s explosion of zeitgeist-grabbing movies about incapable men, grappling with the realisation that it’s about time they grew up. There’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which Apatow wrote and directed. There’s also the cult classic music biopic satire Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which he co-wrote with Jake Kasdan. The Cable Guy, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Step Brothers, meanwhile, are just some of the projects he’s served on as a producer.

A remarkable run of movies since the beginning of the 2010s have seen his comic signature evolve into something more tender. Films like Funny People, This Is 40 and The King of Staten Island are all funny, sure – but there’s an introspection to his work nowadays that has been fascinating to behold. 

On this week’s episode, Judd revisits one of his best-loved movies: 2007’s Knocked Up. But it’s not his first draft we delve into. Instead, as a window into his creative process, we uncover emails that the filmmaker sent to himself in the run-up to writing the movie, full of lengthy streams of consciousness about what the comedy could be – and why a stoner played by Seth Rogen having a baby with a high-flying media personality played with poise by Katherine Heigl would be hilarious.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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